[liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: Licensing of jlouis to make it more suitable for others
- From: Christian Egli <christian.egli@xxxxxxxx>
- To: Michael Whapples <mwhapples@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:43:53 +0200
Hi Michael
It seems that this discussion has become somewhat obsolete, but I
wanted to respond to you anyway.
Michael Whapples <mwhapples@xxxxxxx> writes:
> I realise that the QPL which I chose to publish jlouis
> (http://bitbucket.org/mwhapples/jlouis) may not be suitable for some
> projects. Now the first thing to notice is that I am prepared to
> negotiate licenses here, may be someone could help me find a suitable
> one for external projects whilst giving me the protection I desire.
My concern is first and foremost to eventually integrate liblouis in the
Daisy Pipeline. For that it needs to have Java bindings. Now to avoid
murky legal waters I'm trying to stay away from too much license mixing.
As both Liblouis and Daisy Pipeline are LGPL it would be great if the
Java bindings would also be the same license. That is just convenient
from the perspective of a user of the bindings.
> My concern from that is if I were to refuse certain alterations to be
> included in my official version then people may just fork the code. In
> such an event I want to ensure that those who fork the code must make
> it very clear what their changes are, therefore guaranteeing that I
> would have no association to any change I do not like. Ideally I would
> also want it that any fork has to be renamed, again this is to help
> make it clear what is my version and what is a modified version.
I understand your concerns. There are probably licenses out there that
make this possible. However from the perspective of a user these terms
just make it very inconvenient to use it and combine it with other
software and they also make it very inconvenient to improve your
software, say in case you are no longer interested in it, etc.
I would choose different ways to ensure the quality of your bindings.
Try not to use legal hurdles but instead be a good maintainer and keep
people from forking that way. You will never be able to stop people from
forking anyway. If they are determined they will just rewrite the whole
code (as we seem to witness now :-)).
> Finally I will come to the copyright matter. At the moment I see very
> little advantage for me to hand over copyright to abilitiessoft and
> viewplus, jlouis seems to work well enough as a third party module and
> I see little advantage to including it actually in liblouis.
I don't know who asked you to hand over the copyright. Certainly in the
case of my changes to liblouis I never handed over the copyright (I
wouldn't really have a problem with it though). I see no problem with
different people having the copyright to different parts of the code.
Unless of course you want to distribute the code under a different
license. This you could only do if you owned the copyright.
Hope that helps.
Thanks
Christian
--
Christian Egli
Swiss Library for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Print Disabled
Grubenstrasse 12, CH-8045 Zürich, Switzerland
For a description of the software and to download it go to
http://www.jjb-software.com
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